Page:Guy Boothby - The Beautiful White Devil.djvu/221

, her polite attentions have been bestowed upon Singapore, from which place she has abducted, with singular cleverness, a young English doctor, whose acquaintance she had made in Batavia, and with him a certain well-known resident by name Ebbington. These two affairs were managed with that dexterity which the Beautiful White Devil has taught us to expect from her, the sequel, however, we have yet to learn. Surely, and we say it for the fiftieth occasion, it is time some definite steps were taken by Government to bring about the capture of a woman who, while being a picturesque and daring enough subject for a novel, has been a continual menace and danger to the commerce of the East for a greater number of years than the editorial chair cares to reckon."

I cut the paragraph out and, having placed it in my pocket-book, turned to the next issue published a week later. Here I found another quarter column devoted to her exploits. This one was also from the Hong Kong paper and ran as follows:

"Last week we described what may be considered two of the cleverest and most daring exploits in the whole of the Beautiful White Devil's extraordinary career. We refer to the abduction of an English doctor, travelling in the East in order to study Asiatic diseases, and a well-known figure in Singapore society, Mr. Arthur James Ebbington, whose bay pony, Cupid, it will be remembered, won the Straits Settlement's Cup